How to rate a network

[cesar_pineda]

Can somebody provide an advise on how to rate a LAN network?

I have cisco and HP switches and I have cisco routers 2500, 2600 & 3600.

I want to take a base line to prove that I need to upgrade my network

Any help is greatly appreciated

[rsissons]

You are probably best with some form of Network Management application which used SNMP to poll the devices on the network for utilisation statistics etc. You can then graph these to determine whether utilisation is increasing to justify an upgrade.

Cisco's network management package is CiscoWorks but there are many others on the market.

[cesar_pineda]

Will the SNMP devices track errors too? What would be the command to enable the mirror of all traffic to a monitor port on cisco switches?

[rmushtaq]

Here's a White Paper on Baseline Process:

http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/126/HAS_baseline.html